Is it possible to exclude an area from printing in Word 2010?

Question

There is some content that is automatically populated in one of our Word document templates.

I was wondering if it is possible to have this zone visible when looking at the document, but not have it appear when the doc is printed/converted to PDF. (sort of like the opposite of defining a "print area" in excel, defining a "no print zone"

I can change word settings, as well as the template if need be.

Solution

Yes, you just need to set the text as hidden.

Before you do that, you need to turn on the display of hidden text by clicking File -> under help Options -> Display. Then in the section Always show these formatting marks on the screen make sure that Hidden text is checked.

Now, select the text you want to hide, right-click it, and go to Font... dialog. In the dialog, the middle section is called Effects where the last (bottom-right) option is Hidden; check it. The text will now be displayed with a faint dotted underline and won't print.

If you have some data in a table that you want to hide but want to keep the table, you need to go cell by cell selecting just the text (when a cell is selected, the whole area is blue) and mark it hidden. If you want to hide the whole table, select the entire table and click the square button in the lower-right corner of the Font group in the Home tab to bring up Font dialog.

Comments

[Admin]

"If you want to hide the whole table, select the entire table and click the square button in the lower-right corner of the Font group in the Home tab to bring up Font dialog." Note that this will not hide the table borders, only the text. This has bugged me for years but I have found no workaround.

[Nick]

This isn't true. I used the answer from dnbrv above and created a SECTION in my word document. I put tables, headings, and other items in the section and marked the entire section as hidden. The entire contents of the section were hidden (no empty table outlines or what-not were printed/displayed).

[Nick]

See my comment below for Dario. You can make use of SECTIONS (see PAGE LAYOUT tab) to do what is described here. I hid images and entire tables (including borders, outlines etc.) using this method. This worked out great because I had blocks of descriptive text/tables/images for analysts to read to guide their document formatting. This made it easy for them to write their contents and not worry about deleting all the correct elements.

[Dario de Judicibus]

But a section is a fragment of a document. You cannot hide groups of elements in a page. You must hide them one by one.